


The Time Between

by isabel_archer



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-08-13
Updated: 2017-09-26
Packaged: 2018-08-08 12:56:23
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 8,111
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7758661
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/isabel_archer/pseuds/isabel_archer
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Contemporary assassin/spy thriller AU.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. The First Version

And he would say,

in a short time you will be here again.

And in the time between

you will forget everything:

those fields of ice will be

the meadows of Elysium.

-Louise Glück, "Persephone the Wanderer"

* * *

_Cairo, Egypt._

_Before._

The Starks frequently entertained. That was what Cat called it: _entertaining_. “It’s expected of someone in Ned’s position,” she had explained to him once, over tea in a café near the Borsa. She was a newlywed, the huge sapphire on her left hand weighing her down like an anchor. "It's expected," she said again, and then stared at him, waiting. Waiting for what?

Waiting for him to confess that he had followed her to Cairo, probably. Or, perhaps—and it was this possibility that had tortured him in the years since—waiting for him to say the exact thing that he had wanted to say, which was: _Fuck that. Fuck three hour lunches at the Nile Club, fuck shopping weekends with the other embassy wives. Fuck that ugly rock on your finger. Forget all of that and come away with me._

In his mind he had returned again and again to that moment, to that little café, to the silence that had fallen between them. He could still hear the slow turn of the ceiling fan overhead, the murmur of two old men arguing over their game of chess. And he could still hear the coldness in his own voice when he had finally replied, “Is it?” He hadn’t seen her for a long time after that. Years.

Then the invitations started to arrive, to dinners and charity galas and the occasional birthday party, all on heavy cream cardstock with a Gothic _S_ embossed on the top.

Occasionally she would scrawl something on the bottom: _Hope to see you there_ , or sometimes, _Petyr, It’s been too long!_

He never accepted, never bothered to reply. Perhaps she wondered about it; perhaps it hurt her feelings. Perhaps she never thought about it at all.

Then one day she called him at the bank, asking if he'd come to a party for an internationally famous artist. There would be, she assured him, a lot of interesting people there. She even named a few of them: a movie star, a bureau chief, a general and his wife.

It was the bit about the general that caught his attention. And so, two weeks later, he found himself striding through the dark labyrinth of central Cairo, wearing a badly cut linen suit and a shitty pair of loafers.

The Starks lived in Garden City amongst all of the other wealthy Westerners, doctors and lawyers, diplomats and executives. The neighborhood was only a few miles from the rush and stink of Tahrir Square, but it might as well have been thousands. Garden City was leafy and quiet, shabby but genteel, full of Italianate mansions and English gardens. “A little piece of Europe in the center of Cairo,” Cat’s father had once said, like the colonialist bastard that he was.

It was all very predictable: candles lining the long, winding drive, a string quartet playing Mozart, Cat in a blue silk dress.

He lingered around the edges of the party. Later, he knew, the other guests would find themselves unable to remember his name, or what he did. Was he an army fellow, an embassy man? Did he work in finance, perhaps? The only thing that they would recall clearly—if, in fact, they recalled anything clearly—was that he had strange eyes.

There was nothing he could do about his eyes. He sometimes wore colored lenses, but only sometimes, and only in direst necessity. He hated them: they made him feel off, somehow, less sure of his senses. And in his line of work, that wasn’t an option. Even a split-second’s hesitation could be fatal.

Besides, Cat—before she was a bureaucrat’s wife, full of demure smiles and false, trilling laughter—had once told him that it wasn’t the color of his eyes that unsettled people. It was something in their expression. “They’re dark,” she had said, studying him with the careful attention that, once upon a time, had been like sunlight to him. “But they’re also, I don’t know, translucent? Like deep, clear water. You can see all the way down.”

He tried to push the past from his mind as he worked the edges of the party. He drank little, ate less; nothing to distract him from the task at hand. He smiled—one can smile and smile and be a villain, he thought—and occasionally shook a hand or clapped a back. He was just an empty suit, a hanger-on. He was no one.

Even as he made the rounds, part of him wanted to call off the job; to finish it another time, in another place. He hated Cat’s house, with its polished wood floors, its fluttering linen drapes, its white-upholstered chaises and ottomans. And he hated Cat’s children. They were all sturdy Stark types, tumbling around on fat little legs and saying cute things.

Only the girl interested him. Sansa. She was older, sixteen or maybe seventeen. Red-haired, pale, frail looking. He stood in the shadows near the house, smoking a cigarette and watching as her mother interrogated her about a missing bottle of Clos d’Ambonnay.

He glanced at his watch, a hideous Patek Phillipe knock-off. Eight minutes until midnight.

After Cat had finished her lecture, the girl meandered over to him. Her eyes were glassy and a little red. “You saw that,” she said.

He shrugged.

She hesitated. “Can I have a cigarette?”

He tapped another cigarette from the pack and held it out.

She took the cigarette, bending forward as he lit it. “This would really piss my mom off. She smokes sometimes though. She thinks I don’t know.”

He squinted at the girl through a haze of smoke. “Cairo is a dangerous place. Your father is an important man. I’m sure it’s . . . stressful.”

She gave him a wary look. “You knew my mom, right?”

He noted her use of the past tense. “A long time ago, back in D. C. We were just kids.”

She studied his face, and then, for no reason that he could discern, seemed to relax. They smoked in companionable silence for a few minutes, watching the glittering guests mill around the pool.

“I fucking hate this,” Sansa said. She might have meant: this party, this house, Garden City, Cairo, the world.

It was one minute until midnight.

Petyr dropped his cigarette, grinding it into Cat’s exquisite limestone patio. “Me too,” he said, and, without another word, melted into the crowd of revelers.

Precisely forty-five seconds later—he had timed it on the hideous watch—there was a piercing scream. The crowd parted to reveal a middle-aged man lying on the ground. There was no blood, of course, but if someone had looked closely they would have noticed a slight blackening around the lips and nostrils.

A blonde woman half the man’s age leaned over him, shrieking.

Peter watched the scene unfold from a spot near the door. The job was done; time to go. Scanning the crowd one last time, his eyes stopped on the girl. She was staring at him, her face white, her cheeks hot. It was almost, he thought, as if she had seen what he had done. That was impossible, of course. No one ever saw him. He was an invisible man. It was why he was so good at what he did.

At the front door Cat caught his arm. She had been busy in the house somewhere, dealing with recalcitrant maids or caterers or children, and did not yet know that a four star general was lying dead on her patio.

“Petyr,” she said, in a voice that used to make him feel something. “Petyr, I’m sorry we didn’t get to catch up tonight. Ned and I would love for you to come for dinner sometime soon. I know the bank keeps you busy, but we could introduce you to the children, Robb’s in college now, Yale, can you believe it? Do you remember—”

“I’d like that,” he interrupted, as the sounds from the patio grew more intrusive, and sirens began to wail down the quiet streets of Garden City. He smiled, squeezing her hand. “I’d love to come for dinner, really. Work is murder now, but soon.”

She kissed his cheek. “Okay, then.”

He was still thinking as he slipped out of the house and down an alleyway.

He was thinking about Cat’s red-haired daughter, and whether it was possible that she had seen something.

He was thinking about the way that Cat had said, “Ned and I would love . . .”

It doesn’t matter, he told himself, as he dumped the jacket, the watch, and the empty vial into the river.

When he got to his apartment in Imbaba, he undressed, then lay on the floor and drank one beer after another. He drank until there were six or seven or maybe a dozen empty cans scattered around him. He could hear the girl in the apartment next door crying, the old man on the other side snoring. Somewhere further off a radio blasted an Arabic pop song from the 80s. _If this is love_ , the woman warbled, _then love is misery_.

The air smelled of piss and grease and asphalt and sweat, and, faintly, lilies. Above him the water-stained ceiling began to spin. It was very late or very early. Soon the day’s first call to prayer would begin to ring out from the mosques.

It doesn’t matter if she meant it, he told himself again. And, as it turned out, it didn’t.

In less than a year, Catelyn Tully Stark would be dead.


	2. The Second Version

_Somewhere near Saignon, France._

_After._

The bus pulled into the village around noon.

Sansa, light-headed from hunger and lack of sleep, managed to trip on the last step, falling and tearing open both knees. Wordlessly, she pulled herself to her feet. A little bit of blood was the least of her problems. It was fair to say that her journey had had an inauspicious start. Her cell phone and tablet had been stolen in the airport the previous night, and the bus ride from Marseille (un-air conditioned, of course) had taken four hours, much longer than she’d expected. To make matters worse she’d spent the entire ride deflecting the attentions of her seatmate, an “entrepreneur” who stank of Gitanes and cheap vodka, and who had punctuated lengthy descriptions of his business triumphs by touching her thigh.

Her one piece of luck was that Monsieur Creep seemed to have lost all interest in her. As she sat on a bench dabbing at her knees with a tissue, he barked a few words into his cell phone, then strode with what looked like great purpose towards the village center.

She walked in the opposite direction, pausing in front of a café on a narrow side street. The place looked like something out of a storybook, with freshly painted blue shutters and stone planters filled with red geraniums. The wooden sign read: CAFÉ, ÉPICERIE, QUINCAILLERIE. One stop shopping, Sansa thought.

Inside, she seated herself at the tiled counter, where the elderly proprietor, who identified himself as Barthomieu, greeted her with a barrage of friendly questions: what was mademoiselle’s name? Was she travelling alone? Did she have family in the area?

Barthomieu, accepting both her vague answers and her handful of coins, returned with the coffee she had ordered, as well as a mushroom omelette and a slice of bread smeared thickly with butter. “You remind me of my granddaughter,” he said, as, ignoring her protests, he poured her a glass of milk. “Pilar is about your age. She is studying in Paris. I would be very happy if someone fed Pilar from time to time. So.” He nudged the plate towards her.

Sansa tore into the food. She hadn’t eaten since the previous afternoon, when she had wolfed down a hamburger and a bag of salt and vinegar potato chips at the Marseille airport. She hadn’t expected to eat again until she found him and . . . and what? She had no real answer, she had no real plan. She only knew that she had to find him.

“Barthomieu,” she said, between bites of omelette, “I’m looking for someone. Someone I think lives around here. Do you think you might be able to help me?”

Barthomieu was happy to help, but he did not know anyone by the name of Petyr Baelish. In fact, he explained, there were not many Americans in the area at all. 

“He might be using a different name,” Sansa said. She pulled the photograph from her back pocket. It was old, from one of her mother’s college scrapbooks, but when she had last seen him he had looked more or less the same.

Barthomieu called his wife over—“my Sylvie,” he told Sansa proudly—and the two spoke for several moments in Provençal too fast and thick for Sansa’s schoolgirl French to follow.

Sylvie studied the photo, then handed it back to Sansa. Had perhaps this Mister Baelish gotten her into trouble and then run off? she asked, looking meaningfully at Sansa’s stomach.

Sansa shook her head. “Non, non. Monsieur Baelish est . . . il est l’ami de ma mere.”

Sylvie shrugged; this did not mean that he had not gotten her into trouble.

Sansa decided to try again. “Il est . . . comme mon oncle.”

“Ah,” said Barthomieu, clearly relieved, “This man, he is like your uncle.”

Sansa nodded, and, after wiping her fingers on a napkin, reached into her duffle and pulled out a small leather-bound book. “This was my mother’s journal,” she explained, “She died—oh, a little less than two years ago.” She was not above playing the dead mother card.

She paged through the book, then turned it around to face Barthomieu and Sylvie. On the right hand leaf there was a pen-and-ink drawing of a stone cottage. It was a landscape view, the perspective deep enough that one could see that the cottage stood alone in a field, with forest on three sides and a mountain rearing up behind. Sansa pointed at the ink mountain, with its distinctive serrated ridge, and then pointed out the window, where the same ridge rose perhaps twenty miles distant. “Mont Belledonne, oui?”

The couple began to speak rapidly to one another.

Sansa caught only the phrase “les doights.”

“Les Doights?” she interrupted.

“Oui,” said Sylvie. “It is called Les Doights because of the way the land juts into the forest, you see.” She tapped the drawing. “But this place, it is isolated. And it has been empty for years. It is not a good place for a young woman all alone.”

“Is there someone who could drive me there? I can pay.” Sansa could not, in fact, pay. But she would worry about that later. All that mattered was finding him. She would walk if she had to.

The couple glanced at once another, and then Barthomieu said, “I will call Hollard and see if he will be driving to Auribeau this afternoon. He could perhaps take you there on the way. And he will accept no payment, I am certain.”

While her husband called Hollard, Sylvie gathered two loaves of bread, a wedge of chèvre, a dozen pale blue eggs, a box of ripe cherries, and a log of butter rolled in wax paper. She packed it all into a brown paper bag and presented it to Sansa with a flourish.

Sansa took the bag. “Thank you,” she said. “I wish . . . I mean, if I can pay you, I will. I promise.”

The old woman smiled, looking amused and worried all at once. It was a very motherly look, and, meeting it, Sansa suddenly felt that she might burst into tears.

“De rien, ma petite,” Sylvie said, patting her on the arm, “de rien, de rien.”

“Ce n’est pas rien,” Sansa replied. She blinked hard, then set down the brown paper bag next to her duffle and turned to look out the window. A blue pick-up truck, the back filled with cages of frantically squawking chickens, was skidding to a stop in front of the café.

Sansa followed Barthomieu and Sylvie outside. Barthomieu insisted on helping her into the cab and arranging her bags at her feet. Sylvie shut the door, then leaned through the open window. “Good luck, ma petite,” she said to Sansa. And then, sharply, to Hollard: “See that you do not scare her with your crazy driving, or I will be speaking with your mother.”

Monsieur Hollard was a large, cheerful man a few years older than her brother Jon. His given name was Dionte, and he loved to talk, about chickens and video games and his sister’s children, and he didn’t seem to care that Sansa could understand less than half of what he was saying. He was also an insane driver, blaring American pop and rap music, weaving all over the place, shouting greetings at people working in the barley fields that rose up on either side of the highway.

After about forty minutes, he brought the truck to screeching halt at the mouth of a dirt road lined with ancient plane trees. “This is the right place?” Sansa asked. “Les Doights?”

Dionte nodded, then, as she gathered her bags, turned the radio up full blast. “Best song, yes?” he said, over the opening bars of Mariah Carey’s “Always Be My Baby.”

Sansa grinned, feeling lighter than she had in a while. “Yeah. Best song. Thanks.”

After the truck had vanished in a cloud of dust and gravel, the chickens squawking in angry counterpoint to Mariah, Sansa stood for a moment, thinking. Everything was silent and still in the early afternoon sunlight. Then she squared her shoulders, gathered up her duffle and the brown paper bag, and, humming to herself, set off down the road.

By the time Les Doights came into view some twenty minutes later, Sansa was covered in sweat, her t-shirt plastered to her back, her legs coated in reddish dust. Sylvie hadn’t been kidding when she said this place was isolated.

The house was smaller than Sansa had expected, the surrounding mountains and trees much bigger. The only sign of habitation was a patch of freshly burned brush in front of the cottage.

When there was no answer to her knocks, she tested the door. It swung open with a screech. “Hello?” she called, stepping forward. She paused on the threshold, allowing her eyes to adjust to the sudden darkness. The house was cool, a little dank, maybe, but not unpleasantly so. It smelled like a cave, cold and clean. Cautiously, she wandered through the first floor. There wasn’t much: just a living room, a kitchen, and a bathroom. The bathroom was tiny but fastidiously clean, and Sansa, looking through the cabinet above the sink, found a plastic razor, a bar of soap, and several unlabeled bottles of pills.

In the kitchen she searched through the cupboards and the fridge. They were mostly empty, but, like the bathroom, very clean. Sansa unpacked her groceries, leaving the bread on the counter. At least she hadn’t come empty-handed, she thought.

Halfway up the stairs to the second floor, she had to stop and sit down. Her heart was pounding, her legs were shaking, and there were black floaters at the edges of her vision.

It’s just the heat, she told herself. The heat, and the lack of food and sleep. That’s all. There’s nothing to fear. But she knew that this was not true. The man she was looking for might have been her mother’s friend, but that was a long time ago, and her mother was dead.

It turned out that the reminder of her mother’s death—the blood she hadn’t seen; the screams she hadn’t heard—was just what she needed to galvanize her. She took a few deep breaths, then stood and continued to climb.

The second floor was one big room, with a steeply pitched roof and three low windows that looked out over the road. It was empty except for a mattress covered in a white sheet—no, pillow, no blanket—and a half-empty bottle of whiskey. Sansa sat down on the edge of the mattress, then lay back, leaving her blood, dirt, and sweat-streaked legs stretched out over the floor.

It was so quiet here. There was no sound but the slight murmur of air through the eaves, the cry of a bird somewhere far off. A hawk maybe; it was a hungry, lonely sound. Her fingers loosened, her eyelids fluttered shut. She would rest, she thought, just for a few minutes, no more than ten, and then she would go wait downstairs, or maybe outside. She just needed to rest, first . . .

She was yanked out of a heavy, dreamless sleep by the feeling of something cool and hard pressed against her temple. She found herself staring into a pair of grey-green eyes. They belonged to Petyr Baelish, and he was holding a gun to her head. “If you don't mind me asking,” he said calmly, “What the fuck are you doing in my house?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well, New England continues to be super effing hot, so here's another chapter. (You'll notice that everyone is continually sweating in this fic, btw.)
> 
> I hope you guys enjoyed this installment! And thanks so much (so, so, so much) for your comments on chapter one--I'll respond soon!
> 
> <3


	3. Rift

She was blinking up at him with what looked like utter confusion and terror: eyes wide, cheeks flushed, mouth slightly open. He could see her pulse hammering away at her temples and the base of her throat.

“Who sent you?” Petyr asked, in the same calm voice. When she didn’t answer, he pressed down a little harder. “It would inconvenience me to blow your brains out,” he said, casually, conversationally. “It would be so . . . _messy_.” He glanced at the blood- and dirt-streaked mattress. “Although you’ve already ruined the bed. That sheet is D. Porthault, you know. Egyptian linen. 800 thread count.”

She blinked, hard, and licked her lips. “I—I—don’t you recognize me?”

He squinted at her, keeping the gun level. If Cersei or Roose or whoever the hell had sent her had thought that he wouldn’t kill her because she was Cat’s daughter, because she had pretty blue eyes and pretty red hair—well, they were sorely mistaken. He let out of a sharp, short, laugh. “Of course I know who you are.” He leaned in. “And as much as I’d love to catch up, I’m afraid that a bit short on patience these days. So be a good girl and _tell me who sent you_.”

“No one!” She was crying now, taking in great gulping breaths between words. “No one sent me, I swear.”

Petyr sighed. “Stand up.” He kept the gun at her temple as she pushed herself first to her elbows and then to her feet, trembling all the while. The crying was silent now, which he appreciated. She was perfectly still as he patted her down, his hands moving down her arms, up the insides of her thighs.

When he straightened, their eyes met for an unguarded instant. Her arm shot out and she feinted towards the stairs. He caught her fist mid-air, and in a moment had her backed against the wall, her arms pinned up by her head. They were both breathing hard.

“What are you doing here?” he asked. Did she know enough to be afraid of the softness in his voice? If she was an agent, then she was a piss-poor one. But perhaps her weapon wasn’t speed or strength. After all, she had managed to catch him unawares, if only for an instant. When was the last time that had happened?

Or maybe he was slipping. Could it be the pills? He was very careful to limit himself to 30 milligrams a day. Any less than that and the nightmares would come back; any more than that and he’d be an addict. And he wasn’t an addict. He didn’t shoot up, he never had. He crushed and snorted his opiates like a civilized fucking person.

Sansa was staring at him with an expression he didn’t like, as if she somehow knew what he was thinking.

He shook her a little. “What are you doing here?” he hissed.

“I told you,” she said, sounding almost haughty, “I came on my own. I thought you could—I don’t know—help me.”

He took a half-step back, putting a few inches of empty space between them. His eyes strayed to her throat, to the insistent throb of her pulse. I could snap her neck so easily, he thought. No blood, no fuss. No pain, either.

He dragged his gaze upward. “Help you?” he repeated, not bothering to keep the incredulity from his voice. “And what gave you that brilliant idea?”

“I don’t know.”

Either she was a fantastic actress, or she really was what she seemed to be, a scared kid who had somehow done what his highly trained enemies could not: find this place. Find _him_. Of course, she had come in like a bull in a china shop, tripping every alarm and safeguard he’d put in place. But that, too, could be a strategy.

A piece of hair had escaped from her ponytail. He shifted both of her wrists into one hand and brushed it back. “If you’re looking for a protector,” he said, with as much gentleness as he could muster, “then you’ve come to the wrong place.”

She straightened, pulling against his grip. Her wrists were so fragile, like little birds, with little throbbing hearts. All he had to do was squeeze.

“I saw what you did,” she said. “At the party, two years ago.” Her neck was slick with perspiration. So was her upper lip, and the hollow above her chin.

“What did you see?”

She shook her head. “I don’t know, exactly. I saw you moving through the crowd. I saw him go down. But I know it was you. You killed him. You killed General Arryn.”

“And why would I do that?”

“I don’t know,” she said, and then again, “I don’t know. Look, I was wrong to show up here, obviously, it was stupid, I’ll just take my stuff and leave—” She was twisting in his grip now. The initial shock had worn off and the real fear had set in. He could see it in her face: the knowledge that she was stranded in the middle of nowhere with a killer.

He tightened his grip and moved forward again, so that their faces were perhaps six inches apart. “You’re not leaving, Sansa.”

She looked at him, her gaze steadier than he would have expected. Her eyes were blue, blue, blue. A different blue than Cat’s, brighter and sharper. “If you’re going to kill me,” she said, “then just do it. Don’t . . . toy with me. You owe her that much at least.”

Petyr stared back at her, with the sudden, vertiginous feeling of a gulf opening up at his feet. He should kill her, snap her neck, be done with it. It was the smart thing to do.

Instead he found himself releasing her, giving her a small shove towards the wall. Away from him.

Sansa sagged back against the wall, eyes closed. He watched as she struggled to slow her breathing. She must have really believed that he was going to kill her. Smart girl.

“Give me a reason not to kill you,” he said.

Her eyes flew open. “My entire family was murdered.”

“Very sad,” he said. “But I’ve killed plenty of orphans.” He pulled his forefinger and thumb into a gun-shape and pointed it at her, thinking,  _God, I'm an asshole._

“It wasn’t a random attack," she said.

This was not new information. Anyone who knew anything knew that the "terrorist attack" that had killed five members of the Stark family had in fact been a targeted hit. But how in the hell did _she_ know that?

He shrugged. "Where's your proof?"

“I can’t tell you,” she said warily. “But I can promise me that if you kill me, you’ll never know.”

“And what makes you think that I care?”

She lifted her chin. “You care.”

He smiled at her; a cold smile, a ruthless one. It was a smile that said _you’d be a fool to trust me_. It was a smile that said _I have no heart_.

“We don’t have to like or trust each other to work together,” she continued, looking more confident. “I have information, you have skills. And I’ll be able to pay you for your services once my trust fund kicks in a month or so—”

“Pay me for my services,” he repeated. “Tell me, Sansa, what did you have in mind? Espionage, murder, torture? Because those are my specialties.”

She bared her teeth at him. “All of the above. If necessary.”

“You want justice, I suppose.”

“Oh no,” she said. “I’m done with all of that.”

“If you don’t want justice,” he said, allowing boredom to infuse his voice, “then what is it, exactly, that you want?”

Sansa gave him a slow, radiant smile. “Revenge.”


	4. Circle

Petyr looked at her a moment, not speaking. Then he leaned against the wall and smiled—a swift flash of a smile that seemed to change his whole face. It was, Sansa thought, the first real smile that he had given her.

She looked away, her face warm. She had just told this man—this stranger—her deepest secret. The secret she hadn’t told her best friend, her sister, her ex-boyfriend, her therapist. And it had come out so easily, falling from her mouth like a petal from a dying flower: _revenge_. She wanted revenge.

After the funerals, there had been a lot of talk about bringing the responsible parties to justice, about making them pay their debt to society. Sansa didn’t give a shit about society. She wanted those bastards to pay their debt to _her_.

She couldn’t make it through the day without an arsenal of anti-anxiety and anti-depressive medications. She had nightmares, panic attacks while on buses, walking to class, riding the elevator. She hated being alone, but she also hated people. She was afraid of dying, but she fantasized—not about killing herself; it hadn’t gotten that bad. No, she had just wanted to _become dead_ , in some easy and painless way.

For almost two years, revenge had been her only true friend. It came with her to class, sitting beside her while some professor droned on about medieval art history, it encouraged her to choke down some food—something, anything—at mealtimes in the cafeteria. Revenge was with her while she ran lap after furious lap at four o’clock in the morning, while some jock grunted above her in the darkness after yet another shitty final club party.

They had all started to blur together, the classes and the running and the parties and the jocks. Slowly, everything in her life—everything that had once seemed so important—faded to nothingness, until only revenge remained, bright and vivid and real.

Then she had managed to fail three classes in a single semester (an impressive feat, considering grade inflation), and Harvard had “strongly recommended” that she take a leave of absence. In return for Sansa taking her grief elsewhere, they would wipe the failing grades from her record. But where was she supposed to go? Back to Cairo? There was nothing there for her now, just an empty house. Jon was shacked up with some girl in Reykjavik; Arya was in boarding school in Connecticut. There was her grandfather’s place in Georgetown, but something told Sansa that old Hoster wouldn’t be pleased about her showing up on his doorstep.

She had had nowhere to go. And so she had come here, to this man, this stranger, this killer, all because he had once looked at her with those cold, clear eyes, and seemed to really see her. She was, she thought, quite possibly the stupidest person who had ever lived. She was like those girls in horror movies, who, trapped in a house with a murderer, decided to run down into the basement instead of out the front door.

Petyr was still leaning against the wall, still looking at her. “And what would your mother say, do you think?” he asked, in a low, strange voice. “About your desire to avenge her?”

Sansa ran a hand over her face. Her parents had raised her to turn the other cheek, to forgive, to love her neighbor as herself. “I’m a different person now,” she said. “My mother wouldn’t recognize me. But I don’t think she’d recognize you, either.”

Petyr cocked his head, as if listening to something far off, then turned his attention back to her. “Why do you say that?”

Sansa shrugged. Where to start? The man standing before her now was not the man that she had met two years ago. That man had been attractive, like this one. But it had been an ordinary, shallow attractiveness, a Ken doll mask patched together out of gelled hair, a cheap suit, a cheap smile. That man had been forgettable, though she hadn’t forgotten him.

This man . . . he was someone else entirely. He was wearing a faded t-shirt, old jeans. He was barefoot. His dark hair was a little longer and a lot wilder. This man frightened her far more than the other one had.

“Your hair’s longer,” she began, lamely. “And, um . . .”

Petyr stepped forward with sudden purpose, but stopped short of touching her. Instead he pressed a hand into the wall above her head.

Sansa straightened, bringing them almost eye to eye. She kept her breathing even. If he was going to kill her, he would have done it already. Probably.

“And, um,” he prompted.

“And you look like shit,” she lied. He looked . . . disheveled, sure. Maybe like he hadn’t been eating or sleeping much, maybe like he’d been hitting the whiskey a little too hard, but who was she to judge? She’d had her stomach pumped twice in the last six months.

He ignored her, his pale eyes drifting from her neck, where her traitorous heart beat out a staccato rhythm, down to her bloodied knees, and up again to her face. “You think you know me?” he murmured, “because of a passing moment, years ago now? Poor Sansa. Poor little rich girl, sneaking champagne and cigarettes. You wanted an escape from that false, glittering world, and you thought I might just be it.” He shook his head. “Like most people, you saw what you wanted to see. You didn’t see me.”

Sansa leaned forward. “Maybe you’re right,” she snapped. “But the man I met that night—the smarm in the cheap suit, with the knock-off watch and the Eurotrash shoes?—he couldn’t have killed General Arryn. I wouldn’t have come all this way for that man. And yet here I am. So don’t be so sure that I didn’t see you.”

Petyr took his lower lip between his teeth. He was still looking down at her, his expression unreadable, when the westernmost window shattered.

He was on top of her in an instant, pressing her into the floor. Broken glass glittered all around them.

“God damn it,” he said calmly, exactly as if he had spilled hot coffee on himself, and not at all as if someone had just shot a bullet through the window of his secret spy hideout.

Sansa struggled, but only a little: it was like struggling with a boulder. She laughed, wildly, and said, "Someone  _shot_ at us."

Petyr clapped a hand over her mouth. “ _Be quiet_ ,” he ordered, his breath warm on her neck. “Can you do that for me, Sansa?”

She nodded, wordlessly.

“Good girl,” he whispered. “Now: when I get up, I want you to get into that closet over there. Don't stand; keep low to the ground. And if you come out before I tell you to, you'll be extremely sorry. Either I'll kill you or whoever's out there shooting at us will.”

She nodded again.

In one fluid motion Petyr was on his feet, gun in hand. Then, without so much as a backward glance, he vanished down the stairs.

Sansa crawled into the closet, pulling the door shut behind her. It was pitch dark, and very quiet; she could see nothing, hear nothing. She leaned her head against her knees, rocking back and forth. Her chest was heaving, her lungs squeezing out small, painful breaths. She needed her inhaler. But her inhaler was downstairs, in her duffle.

She realized suddenly that her fingers were wet. She brought them to her nose and smelled iron. She felt herself all over: arms, sides, thighs. Nothing hurt except her knees, which were still full of dirt and gravel but had already begun to scab over.

Shit. If it wasn’t her blood, then it was his.

From somewhere beyond the darkness of the closet, there was a brief eruption of gunfire. Then all was silent.


	5. Unforgiving

Petyr was having a bad day. A terrible, horrible, no good, very fucking bad day.

All he wanted to do was to patch up his shoulder, work his way through a bottle of good scotch, snort a small mountain of Oxy, sleep for a week or two. But instead, here he was, defending his no-longer-safe safe house from a group highly trained operatives—one of whom had already managed to shoot him. His left shoulder burned. The bullet had passed all the way through, but it still hurt like a bitch.

He paused at the bottom of the stairs, then lunged around the corner, coming face-to-face with a bony, Gallic face and a wicked-looking knife. Petyr ducked, assessing the weapon winging towards him in the same instant. It was a Wing-Tactic: eleven inches, polymer handle, stainless steel blade. The favored weapon of the _Groupe d'intervention de la Gendarmerie nationale_ , the French anti-terrorist unit, along with a hundred other elite forces and criminal interests on the continent. In Petyr’s world the Wing-Tactic was as common as Kleenex. It told him nothing about who this man was or who had sent him.

The man lunged at him again, blade extended, but Petyr was not in the mood to play. One bullet through the left eye socket and Monsieur Wing-Tactic was down for good.

He found the second operative prowling around the orchard. She was blonde, slender, and skittish as a hare, her eyes rolling back in her head when she caught sight of him.

He laughed a little as she backed again from him, tripping over a tree root and nearly dropping her weapon. He kicked the operative’s legs out from under her, then knelt, cradling her in his arms like a lover. “What’s your name, sweetling?”

“J-Jeyne.” Her voice was high and breathy, with the posh, slightly lilting British accent that meant an expensive secondary education in a far-flung former colony: Singapore, perhaps, or Ceylon.

“Jeyne,” he said. “That’s a nice name. How many of you are there, Jeyne? How many of you came here to kill me?”

Jeyne shook her head. Her upper lip was sheened with sweat.

She was, he thought, hardly older than the girl he’d hiding left in the closet upstairs.

“I’m very good at what I do,” he said softly. “It doesn’t have to hurt. But it can. And it will, if you don’t tell me what I want to know.” The girl’s brown eyes had gone flat. It was a look he knew well: the distant, glazed look of an animal that knows it has been caught by death. He had first seen it years ago, in the eyes of one of Hoster Tully’s racehorses, a splendid black Thoroughbred that had shattered a fetlock jumping a fence. He had seen it many times since.

“Two,” Jeyne said. “And Harry, the sniper. Just the three of us.”

“And who sent you?” he asked, as if he had all the time in the world.

“I don’t know,” she said miserably, and he knew that she was telling the truth.

If he’d had any real feelings he might have felt bad as he snapped the girl’s neck: blonde, pretty Jeyne, who probably had an equally blond, pretty boyfriend waiting for her back in London or Paris or Barcelona or wherever. As it was he felt nothing but mildly inconvenienced—killing her had wrenched his injured shoulder. He dropped the body and picked up her weapon. She’d saved him the trouble of reloading the Beretta.

The sniper was next. The shot had come from the ridge to the west of the house, and that was where Petyr’s instincts told him the shooter still was, watching and waiting. A good sniper kit took a fair amount of time to set up, and the terrain was difficult, the climb steep and slippery with shale, the ridge itself jagged as the blade of a serrated knife. _Unforgiving_ was the word he’d heard used.

And here Petyr had a real advantage. He might be hungover as all fuck and bleeding from a gunshot wound, but he knew this bleak stretch of land as well as he knew anything.

As shadows fell over the orchards and fields he traced a razorback path up the ridge, shoulder throbbing, blood seeping through the thin cloth of his shirt.

The sniper was a disappointment. Another attractive blond, this one a brawny fraternity brother type, too stupid to have figured out that bulk was almost always a liability in this business.

Jeyne had made the rookie mistake of mentioning the sniper’s name— _Harry_ —and Petyr shouted it as he leapt at the young man from behind, slamming the gun into his right temple and then digging his thumbs into his eye sockets. The sniper roared like a startled bear as blood poured into eyes, trying to swat at Petyr with ham-like fists.

“I’m offended,” Petyr hissed into his ear, “that whoever sent you clearly sent a squad of wet-behind-the-ears trainees. I’m worthy of a better effort, don’t you think?” 

“Fuck you,” Harry howled in a broad American accent. “Fuck you! Where’s Jeyne?”

“Fertilizing my olive trees,” Petyr said, and pulled the trigger.

For a moment Petyr stood panting, staring down at the body, and at the blood and tissue covering the little clearing. “Well, Harry,” he said, “I don’t think this day has turned out the way that either of us would have wished.”

Then he packed up the sniper kit, strapped it to his back, and set off for the house. It was full dark by the time he limped through the front door. He found the girl sitting in the closet, her knees drawn up to her chest.

“Get up,” he said, and she closed her eyes, whimpering.

Fuck. He didn’t have time for this. They had a few hours—perhaps as many as five, perhaps as few as two—before the next round of would-be assassins arrived. A few hours to gather the necessary supplies—money, weapons, passports. A few hours to come up with some sort of plan. When he stepped into the closet she flinched, scuttling back into the corner.

“Get up,” he said again, more harshly this time. Then he reached down, grabbed a fistful of her shirt, and yanked her to him. This could all be an act, Petyr thought, studying her face. To what end, he didn’t know.

He shook her, hard enough that her back teeth snapped together with a loud _crack_. “Do you know what you’ve done, in coming here?” he demanded.

Sansa blinked. “I told you—I thought—”

"Some very bad, very powerful people think that you know something about your family’s death,” he interrupted. “And now they think that I know something about it too.”

She swallowed. “And do you?" Know something about my family’s death?”

Petyr stared down at her, green eyes staring into blue. Seconds passed as he considered the choices before him. The simplest thing to do, and the smartest, and possibly the kindest as well, would be to snap her neck and be done with it. It would be quick and nearly painless. He hadn’t been lying when he had told Jeyne that it didn’t have to hurt. He didn’t particularly enjoy inflicting pain. Anyone could make someone scream. The best kills were the ones that didn’t look like kills at all—the ones that looked like heart attacks, household accidents, car crashes. A clean death required subtlety and grace.

“Do you want to die?” he asked at last. It was a real question, gently spoken, and she must have sensed this, because she seemed to think hard for a moment, before shaking her head.

“No,” she said. “I don’t.”

Something in the stillness of her gaze surprised him; set him off balance for an instant. He set her down, only to have her legs buckle under her. He hissed out an annoyed breath, and swung her into his arms. She was tall. Tall like her mother. In some distant part of his mind he remembered carrying Cat like this, after she had twisted her ankle racing Edmure and Lysa across one of the vast green fields surrounding Hoster Tully's country estate.

Ignoring these thoughts—and the scream of his injured shoulder—he carried the girl downstairs and into the bathroom. He set her on the edge of the bath tub, and, after retrieving a first aid kit from a kitchen cabinet, began to tweeze the gravel out of her knee.

Sansa winced but made no protest. But at the end, when he was really digging in her wounds, she gasped out five terrible words, “I thought you loved her.”

He didn’t answer, but pressed the sharp tips of the tweezers deep into her skin, watching as blood trickled down her pale shins. “I thought you would want to know how she—really died.”

The tweezers fell to the floor with a clatter. Working quickly now, he wrapped clean bandages around her knees—her legs were so pale, and without the freckles that one could expect with pale skin and red hair, just blue webs of veins and arteries. They were like a map to all the ways she could be killed. All the ways that he could kill her. A slice here, a nick there, and it would all be over.

It struck him that he hadn’t looked at anyone in a long time without considering all the ways that they could die by his hand.

“There,” he said, and straightened. He could smell her blood on his hands.

When she stared at him Peytr said, irritably, “What?”

“It’s just—why would go to the trouble of cleaning up my knees if you’re going to kill me?” She didn’t sound hopeful, just curious.

“I’m not going to kill you yet,” he said. “And in the meantime, I can’t have you slowing me down.” He paused. “Go upstairs and sleep. I’ll wake you when it’s time to go.”

Sansa stood, her legs wobbling slightly, like a fawn’s.

“What about you?” she asked.

“I don’t need much sleep,” he said. That was true: he might _want_  sleep, but he didn’t _need_ it. What he did need was to fucking sober up, all the way, and then rig everything to blow. He would miss this house, he supposed; he’d owned it for so long. It was the first thing he’d bought when he’d had any money. He’d thought—well, never mind when he had thought. It was probably a good thing that he was blowing it up.

Sansa paused in the bathroom door.

“Yes?” he said, impatient to deal with the bodies out back, to get the supplies from his arsenal under the shed, and for some reason not wanting her to be aware of any of it.

“It’s just—she trusted you, you know. Before she died, she told me: if there was any trouble, if anything happened, I should go to you. She said that you would help me. That’s why I came. It’s not because I saw you kill that guy. General Arryn."

His jaw worked. “Did—she—know about that?”

Sansa gave him a long, level look. “My mother didn’t see a lot of things,” she said. “She didn’t know you were a killer, if that’s what you mean. But she also didn’t know that I would need one.” With that, she turned with all the gravity of a queen and ascended his stairs, leaving him sitting at the table with a serious hankering for whiskey and pills, and the knowledge that more trouble than he’d ever seen was bearing down on him like a freight train.

**Author's Note:**

> I hope you guys like this. It's approximately a thousand and one degrees in New England right now and I needed a distraction: hence, this fic.
> 
> Also, for anyone who cares, I'm definitely not abandoning (my other multi-chapter fic) The Guarded Crown. I've just been away from writing for a while, busy with school and work and life stuff, and I think writing something contemporary will be a good way to ease back into things.
> 
> Anyway. Thanks so much for reading! <3


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